Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

As in Al Alvarez’s definition of an intellectual, Stalin was someone to whom ideas were emotionally important.² This view of the nature of Stalin’s intellectuality chimes with the idea that while he was an ‘Enlightenment revolutionary’ – a ‘scientific socialist’ who believed that socialism was a rational goal to be secured by reason – he was also a post-Enlightenment romantic who saw socialism as a human creation that could only be achieved through struggle, mobilisation and personal commitment.³ Because he felt so strongly himself about what he was trying to achieve, it is not surprising that Stalin considered ‘emotionally charged mobilization . . . a vital instrument to accomplish ultra-rationalist goals’ and ‘was keenly aware of the mobilizational role of the emotions’.⁴ For Stalin, striving to build socialism was a highly personal and voluntaristic project, and when the results of struggle disappointed, he invariably found the people, not the cause, to be wanting. He would surely have agreed with Fidel Castro’s comment that while socialism had many defects and shortcomings, ‘these deficiencies are not in the system, they are in the people’.⁵

It is sometimes said that Stalin was a psychopath who lacked empathy for the victims of his many crimes against humanity. ‘One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic’ is an oft-cited apocryphal statement attributed to him. It encapsulates the idea that as an intellectual he could both rationalise and abstract himself from his terrible rule. Actually, Stalin had a high degree of emotional intelligence. What he lacked was compassion or sympathy for those he deemed enemies of the revolution. If anything, he had too much human empathy and used it to imagine the worst in people, inventing a mass of fictitious acts of betrayal and treachery – a critical ingredient of the Great Terror that swept through Soviet society in the 1930s, engulfing millions of innocent victims arrested, imprisoned, deported or shot for political crimes. Many lesser terrors followed, culminating with the grotesque ‘Doctors’ Plot’ of the early 1950s, when scores of medics, many of them Jewish, were arrested for allegedly conspiring to murder Soviet leaders. Among those swept up in the last waves of unwarranted arrests were his long-time private secretary, Alexander Poskrebyshev, and the chief of his personal security detail, General Nikolai Vlasik, the former guardian of his young children.⁶

Like many politicians and public figures, Stalin was a subject constructed from the outside inwards; a politically driven personality, someone whose inner mental life was shaped by his public persona and by the ideological universe he chose to inhabit. Stalin was akin to a method actor who interiorised many roles in a performance that he sustained for a lifetime.

This interiorisation of his political selves began with a youthful flirtation with nationalism and populism that resulted in an enduring romantic streak in his personal make-up. Then, as a hardened Bolshevik agitator and propagandist, he reinvented himself as an intelligent and praktik, dedicated to enlightening and organising the masses.⁷ His experience of the revolutionary upheavals of 1905 and 1917 habituated him to political violence. But it was the Russian Civil War, during which he implemented the harshest measures of Bolshevik repression, that inured him to large-scale loss of human life and marked his transition from romantic revolutionary to ruthless practitioner of realpolitik. Appointed the party’s general-secretary in April 1922, he then positioned himself as the consummate administrator of a Soviet state apparatus that he helped create as well as serve.

The Soviet regime was nothing if not bureaucratic and what Stalin mostly read were the myriad of documents that crossed his desk every day. Yet he always found time for his personal collection of books, pamphlets and periodicals. On documents he scrawled decisions and directives for action. His innermost interests and feelings were reserved for the pometki – the annotations and markings he made in his library’s many books. Stalin was quick to pass judgement on authors but he respected their books. This showed in the care with which he marked and annotated them, even those of his enemies. Stalin rarely read to confirm what he already knew or believed. He read to learn something new. Affairs of state abbreviated and disrupted his reading life but did not curtail it completely. In the midst of even the deepest national and international crises, he could be found reading, marking and often editing this or that book.

READING FOR THE REVOLUTION